LED Light Diffusing Plastic Compounds

Plastic compounding is a way to enhance plastic for use in products. The process is done by a company called a "plastic compounder" who mixes plastic like a "chef" would mix ingredients. Engineers at the plastic compounding company mix plastic formulations by mixing or/and blending polymers and additives by heating them up until they "flow" in a molten state. Machines called co-kneaders and twin screws (co- and counter rotating) as well internal mixers are the most common used compounders in the plastic industry.



This is one example of a specialty plastic that is created using the compounding plastic.

Embed Inventables Products Widget

Today we launched a feature that makes it really easy to embed any of the products on Inventables into your own website or blog. To use it simply copy and paste the code snippet and you're done. The embedded products will look like this:



You can add additional text, information, or formatting to match your own site. Let us know what you think!

TEDx Windy City

In 2005 Zach Kaplan (me) the CEO of Inventables was invited to give a TED talk at the conference in Monterey California. In those days Inventables had launched a product called DesignAid that was similar to jelly of the month club but instead of jelly our subscribers got samples of innovative materials and technologies.

This year Zach has been invited back to TED but this time it's TEDx Windy City sponsored by the Museum of Science and Industry, Pivotal Productions, and hosted at Flashpoint Academy.

Other speakers include Donald Marinelli, Head of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University and Dawn Hancock, Creative Director and Owner of Firebelly Design and the Moderator is Dr. Rabiah Mayas, Science Director of the Center for the Advancement of Science Education at the Museum of Science and Industry.

In the spirit of the TED tradition there will be a few amazing performances by the circuit bending duo of RothMobot.

We're hiring! Ruby on Rails - Software Engineers

We believe the best software is written by intentionally small teams that know how to make the impossible possible. We use agile software development techniques to relentlessly focus our coding efforts on solving our business goals. We pair program, and we follow the red-green-refactor loop relentlessly. We deliver early and often. We believe that these practices lead to higher code quality. The team includes our Lead Developer, who is an agilist with a passion for building products that people love to use and a UI Designer, with a passion for usability.

You’ll be our 7th full time employee so we’re looking for someone that wants to work in a VC funded startup that was formerly bootstrapped. You have a passion for web development, are self-motivated, and enjoy working in a user-focused, highly intelligent, entrepreneurial environment. We look for aptitude not experience but you probably have experience working with dynamic languages, are ruthless about testing & refactoring, and bring superior programming skills in the following areas:

Ruby, Rails
Object-oriented programming
BDD/TDD, Agile practices
Pair programming
Javascript, CSS, AJAX
Linux server/stack administration (Apache, MySQL, Postfix, etc)

Full details are here:
http://www.inventablescorporate.com/careers/positions-available/software-engineer/

The sales funnel

The folks over at ReachForce are a team of long time B2B marketers. Their business is focused on providing businesses with custom, high quality, targeted contact lists to fuel their marketing and sales lead generation initiatives.

Their blog covers B2B lead generation, sales, and marketing. A recent post outlines an update to the traditional sales funnel that considers the web.

In their words:
"The Sales 2.0 Funnel (see Figure below) updates traditional sales and marketing cycles by identifying each stage of the Sales 2.0 process and providing you with a sampling of new Web-based technologies that enable you to approach each step in a faster, more cost effective, and measurable way."



Using their categories, we consider Inventables sales leads to be "qualified named prospects". Our goal is to deliver qualified named prospects worth your time. As a vendor, when you tune your product profile on Inventables it will help you only get the ones that are worth your time.